Category Archives: Movies

Once upon a time, directly after Latin class, a certain John asked a certain Kathy to see a movie called The Sand Pebbles. Sadly, Kathy, a member of the marching band, was unavailable because of a football game on the night in question. John did not ask Kathy out again for about seven years, during […]

This evening on our drive to the airport with our 82-year-old visitor, the writer and feminist activist Alix Kates Shulman, the conversation centered on Apple computers, social media, and Spotify. Self-described as “indefatigable,” Ms. Shulman had had a busy day. After breakfasting with Cleveland friends and breezing through the Cleveland Museum of Art, she […]

A couple of months ago, my sisters and I cleaned out the attic of my mom’s old house, unearthing precious mementos amidst the junk. My treasures included my old Bill Cosby records, which I had thought lost. There they were, invaluable to me and maybe even valuable to collectors. I imagined putting them on our old […]

The new movie Pride is what my husband calls, with a hint of irony, a crowd-pleaser. A crowd-pleaser usually contrives not to challenge or surprise the audience but to make them smile and even pander to their world view. A crowd-pleaser can be well-made and fun, but usually contains predictable, almost stylized elements, such […]

Here in Ohio we’re in the midst of an arctic vortex (they’re calling it), producing temperatures far colder than we’re accustomed to. It was around 10 degrees below zero most of yesterday. Schools and workplaces, including my husband’s, are closed today. John views a day off, of course, not as an opportunity to kick back […]

The Cinematheque offers unusual and interesting movies this weekend, which is, of course, its mission. A documentary by Frederick Wiseman, At Berkeley, shows Thursday at 6:45 pm and Friday at 7:30 pm. Every year I teach a class on education reform at Case Western and show Wiseman’s brilliant 1968 doc High School to my students. Wiseman, […]

An interesting event at the Cinematheque tomorrow night inaugurates a great weekend of films. Father Don Cozzens, a noted author and teacher, leads a discussion after La Strada, Federico Fellini’s 1954 Oscar winner (7:00 pm). Pope Francis has cited this as his favorite movie, and Fr. Cozzens will try to figure out why, along with […]

I should have told you to see To Be or Not to Be at the Cleveland Cinematheque last weekend. There was a big crowd there, anyway, because the Plain Dealer wrote a nice story about the film and the Ernst Lubitsch series it’s a part of. Lubitsch’s films are the best kind: they’re classic works […]

Through that chain of connections we call the internet, I happened upon a Canadian controversy. It seems that one David Gilmour, a part-time English professor at the University of Toronto, has outraged a bunch of people by declaring that he’s not interested in teaching books by women. “Virginia Woolf is the only writer that interests […]